The Wrath of Angels (37 page)

And Darina had heard rumors about a detective, one who had crossed paths with those like her, although he remained of little concern to her. Selfishness and viciousness were the curse of her breed, so much so that many of them had forgotten their true purpose on this earth, so lost were they to wrath, and sorrow at all that they had sacrificed in their fall from grace. Even Brightwell had been driven by his own urges, his desire to unite the two halves of the being he worshiped, and he was among the best, and oldest, of them. When he had briefly blinked out of existence, his spirit separating from its host, she had experienced the pain of it so strongly that she had called out to him, willing him to come to her. She had felt his presence near to her, straining to remain close, and she had found a man that night, and in this stranger’s act of insemination, Brightwell had been reborn inside her.

But a crucial element was missing. Aspects of his true nature had manifested themselves early, almost as soon as he could walk, but he seemed to have no memory of how his old form had been taken from him, and with that came his silence. He was traumatized, she supposed, but she could as yet find no way to break down the wall that kept him from truly becoming himself once more.

She watched the boy now as the Backer spoke. The Backer sounded worried, as well he might. His final words left it to Darina to take action against those who were moving against them. The death of Becky Phipps had tipped the balance against the Collector, and his fate now lay in Darina’s hands.

But the plane was the priority: the plane, the list, and the passenger and his fate. She could not allow herself to be distracted, not now. She flipped through the names in her head, for Darina required no list. She had disputed the need for its existence right from the start, but human evil seemed to have a desire to record, to order. It was, she guessed, a function of mortality: even the worst among them, consciously or not, wanted their deeds to be remembered. Something of that need to record had infected her kind.

So Darina went to work, and the order was given to wipe their enemies from the face of the earth.

And while Darina conspired in his destruction, the Collector paid a visit to a church in Connecticut. The final service of the day had concluded, and the last of the congregation had trailed out into the evening. The Collector looked kindly upon them: they simply worshiped a different aspect of the same God.

When the last of them had gone, he watched as the priest said goodbye to the sacristan at the back of the church, and the two men separated. The sacristan drove away while the priest walked through the church grounds and used a key to unlock a gate in the wall: behind it was a garden, and his home.

The priest saw the Collector approach while the gate was still open.

‘Hello?’ he said. ‘Can I help you?’

He had a faint Irish accent, altered by his years in the United States. A security light on the wall beside him illuminated his face. He was a middle-aged man with a full head of hair, but no sign of gray. Instead, the light caught unnatural tints.

‘Father,’ said the Collector. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, but I wish to make a confession.’

The priest looked at his watch. ‘I was about to go to dinner. I take confession every morning after ten o’clock mass. If you were to come back then, I’d be happy to listen.’

‘It’s a matter of some urgency, Father,’ said the Collector. ‘I fear for a soul.’

The curious formulation of the statement passed the priest by.

‘Oh well, I suppose that you’d better come in,’ he said.

He held the gate open and the Collector entered the garden. It was carefully arranged as a series of concentric circles, shrubs and hedges alternating with cobbled paths, and winter flowering plants adding color to it all. Between a pair of elegant box trees stood a long stone bench. The priest sat at one end of it, and indicated that the Collector should sit at the other. The priest took a stole from his pocket, kissed the cross, and placed the vestment around his neck. He quickly whispered some prayers, his eyes closed, and then asked the Collector how long it had been since his last confession.

‘A very long time,’ replied the Collector.

‘Years?’

‘Decades.’

The priest did not look happy to hear that. Perhaps he thought that the Collector might feel compelled to unburden himself of a lifetime of sins, and he would be forced to sit on the cold bench and listen until breakfast. The priest made the decision to cut to the chase. The Collector suspected that this was not the orthodox approach, but he did not object.

‘Go on, my son,’ said the priest. ‘You said that you had a matter of some seriousness to discuss.’

‘Yes,’ said the Collector. ‘A killing.’

That made the priest’s eyes open wider. He started to look worried. He didn’t know the Collector from Adam, and now here they were in the garden of the priest’s own home, about to discuss the death of another human being.

‘You’re talking about – what? An accidental death, or something worse?’

‘Worse, Father. Much worse.’

‘A . . . murder?’

‘It might be viewed that way. I couldn’t really say. It’s a matter of perspective.’

The priest had moved from being worried to actively concerned for his own safety. He saw an out.

‘Maybe you should come back tomorrow after all, once you’ve had a chance to properly consider what it is that you wish to confess,’ he said.

The Collector looked puzzled.

‘Done?’ he said. ‘I haven’t “done” anything yet. I’m
going
to do it. I was wondering if I could have absolution in advance, as it were. I’m very busy. I have a lot to fit into my days.’

The priest stood. ‘Either you’re making fun of me, or you’re a troubled man,’ he said. ‘Whatever is the case, I can’t help you. I want you to go now, and think hard about yourself.’

‘Sit down, priest,’ said the Collector.

‘If you don’t go, I’ll call the police.’

The priest didn’t even see the blade being drawn. One moment the Collector’s hands were empty, and the next there was a flash of light in his hands, and the Collector had risen, the knife pressed hard against the soft flesh of the priest’s throat. The priest heard the garden gate swing on its hinges. His eyes moved to the right, hoping to see someone enter, someone who might help him, but instead there were only deeper shadows moving. They took the form of men in hats and dark clothing, their long coats drifting behind them like smoke, but that wasn’t possible, was it? Then the shapes became clearer, and he could make out the pale features beneath the old fedoras, the eyes and mouths nothing more than dark holes, the skin around them wrinkled like old, rotting fruit.

‘Who are you?’ said the priest, as the shapes drew closer.

‘You betrayed her,’ said the Collector.

The priest was torn between listening to the Collector, and trying to believe what his eyes were seeing.

‘Who? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Barbara Kelly. They put you here to keep watch over her. You befriended her, and as she began to have doubts she shared with you what she planned to do.’

Becky Phipps had told him as much. The Collector liked to think that he had encouraged her to make a full and frank confession.

‘No, you don’t understand—’

‘Oh, but I do,’ said the Collector. ‘I understand perfectly. And you did it for money: you didn’t even have an interesting motive. You just wanted a nicer car, better vacations, more cash in your wallet. What a dull way in which to damn yourself.’

The priest was barely listening. He was terrified by the figures that surrounded him, drifting along the paths of his garden, circling him but drawing no closer.

‘What are those . . .
things
?’

‘They were once men like you. Now they are hollow. Their souls are lost, as yours will soon be, but you will not join their ranks. The faithless priest has no flock.’

The priest raised his hands imploringly.

‘Please, let me explain. I’ve been a good man, a good shepherd. I can still make recompense for what I’ve done.’

The priest’s hands moved fast, but not fast enough. His nails reached for the the Collector’s eyes, raking at them, but the Collector pushed the priest away, and in the same movement flicked the blade at his throat. A small wound opened, and blood began to pour like wine from a tipped goblet. The priest fell to his knees before his judge, who reached down and removed the stole from the priest’s shoulders, then folded it into one of his own pockets. He lit a cigarette, and removed a metal canister from inside his coat.

‘You have been found wanting, priest,’ said the Collector. ‘Your soul is forfeit.’

He sprayed the lighter fluid over the head and upper body of the kneeling man, and took one long drag on his cigarette.

‘Time to burn,’ he said.

He flicked the cigarette at the priest, and turned his back as the man ignited.

T
he lawyer Eldritch turned the key and opened the door to the basement. The light came on automatically, a piece of electrical engineering that never ceased to give him pleasure, and not a little relief, for the truth was that Eldritch was afraid of the dark.

After all, he knew what the dark concealed.

He carefully made his way down the stairs, one hand on the wooden banister rail, the other trailing along the cool wall. He kept a close watch on his footsteps, taking each step slowly and firmly. Eldritch was no longer a young man; in fact, he could barely remember a time when he was other than he was now. Childhood was a dream, early adulthood a blur, the memories of another man somehow adopted as his own, fragments of love and loss; sepia-tinted, as though soaked in tea and faded by sunlight.

He reached the final step and let out an involuntary sigh of satisfaction: another series of obstacles negotiated without incident, his fragile bones still intact. Five years earlier he had stumbled on the sidewalk and broken his hip: the first serious injury or illness of his senior years. The damage had necessitated a full replacement, and now he was acutely conscious of his own vulnerability. His confidence had been badly shaken.

But more than the pain, and the inconvenience of the long period of convalescence, he remembered the dread of the anesthetic, his unwillingness to surrender himself to the void, his struggle against the fluids that coursed through his body when the anesthetist inserted the needle. Darkness: shadows, and more-than-shadows. He recalled his relief when he awoke in the recovery ward, and his gratitude that he had almost no memory of what had occurred while he slept. Not in relation to the operation itself, of course: that was a separate, purely physical reality, a surrender of the body to the ministrations of the surgeon. No, the phantom images that returned with consciousness were of another realm of existence entirely. The surgeon had told him that he would not dream, but this was a lie. There were always dreams, remembered or unremembered, and Eldritch dreamed more than most, if what he experienced when the need for rest overcame him could truly be termed dreams. It was also why he slept less than most, preferring a low-level lassitude to the torments of night.

And so he had returned to this world with pain in his lower body, dulled greatly by the medication but still terrible to him, a nurse with skin of alabaster translucence asking him how he felt, assuring him that he was fine and all had gone well, and he had tried to smile even as frayed threads of memories caught upon the splinters of another realm.

Hands: that was what he remembered. Hands with hooked claws for nails, tugging at him as the anesthetic wore off, trying to pull him down to the place in which they lay; and above them the Hollow Men, soulless wraiths burning with rage at what had been done to them by Eldritch and his client, desperate to see him punished just as they were being punished. Later, once it was clear that the operation had been a complete success and he was out of danger, the surgeon had admitted to Eldritch that there had been a problem when the final stitches were being put in place. Strange, he had said: most patients emerged easily from the anesthetic as its effects wore off, but for almost two minutes it had seemed as if Eldritch were moving deeper into sleep, and they had feared that he was about to lapse into a coma. Then, in a startling reversal, his heart rate had increased to such a degree that they thought he might be about to go into cardiac arrest.

‘You gave us quite a scare,’ said the surgeon, patting Eldritch on the shoulder, and his touch had caused the old lawyer to tense with unease, for the pressure on his skin reminded him uncomfortably of those clawed fingers.

And throughout his period of recovery, both inside and outside the hospital, the Collector had kept watch over him, for Eldritch’s vulnerability was also his own, and their existences were mutually dependent. Eldritch would wake to find the Collector sitting in the soft light of the bedside lamp, his fingers twitching uneasily, his body temporarily deprived of the nicotine that seemed perpetually to fuel it. The lawyer was never entirely sure how the Collector managed to be omnipresent during those early days, for the hospital, so very private and so very expensive, still had certain rules about the appropriateness of visiting times. But in Eldritch’s experience people tended to avoid confrontations with the Collector. He trailed unease just as he trailed the stink and smoke of his cigarettes. That smell: how prevalent it was, how insidious, and how grateful they all should have been for it, for the foul nicotine taint masked a different odor. Even without the cigarettes, the Collector brought with him the smell of the charnel house.

Sometimes, Eldritch himself almost feared him. The Collector was entirely without mercy, entirely committed to his mission in this world. Eldritch was still human enough to have doubts; the Collector was not. There was no humanity left in him; Eldritch wondered if there ever had been. He suspected that the Collector had simply come into the world that way, and his true nature had become more obvious over time.